HEALTH

Today, 2.8 billing people use dirty fuels – wood, coal, and kerosene – for cooking, heating, and lighting. Every year 1.5 million people, mostly women and children, die from emphysema and other preventable respiratory diseases caused by the emissions of these dirty fuels. These people have limited access to hospitals and health care services. The services they can access often lack electricity, preventing them from receiving the lifesaving care they need. Food and medicines cannot be refrigerated, worsening the standard of health. The lack of electricity is a direct contributor to shockingly low health standards.

COMMUNITY

Access to energy is essential for improving sustainable development among local communities. Every objective in the fight against poverty depends on energy, including food security, access to safe water, disease control, maternal and child health, and universal schooling. Around the globe today, billions of people lack access to modern energy services. If local communities had access to sustainably renewable energy, the positive impact would be astounding. Development would exponentially flourish and poverty would be remembered as a grim past of the history of humanity.

EDUCATION

90 million children in sub-Saharan Africa go to primary schools that lack electricity. The lack of access to energy greatly reduces the teaching resources and classroom materials available to these students who are eager to learn. The lack of electric lighting, televisions, computers and other services deters well-trained and well-educated teachers from living and working in communities that may need them the most. Education has been identified as the single most effective combatant against poverty. Clean, renewable energy is the solution to bring education to the poverty stricken and under-developed communities of the world and push human kind into the future of global prosperity.

ECONOMY

The lack of access to modern energy services is a serious hindrance to economic and social development. Modern energy services are crucial to economic stability and development among local, national, and global communities; and yet, globally, over 1.3 billion people are without access to electricity which, in this day and age, is a human right not a privilege. More than 95% of these people are either in sub-Saharan African or developing Asia and 84% are in rural, off-grid areas.